Tacos and Beer

We lost an honest-to-goodness filmmaking giant when Roger Corman passed away on May 9. Corman was making horror and science fiction movies on shoestring budgets long before the big studios came in and started making those kinds of movies with monster budgets. And Corman also gave many renowned filmmakers and actors their first jobs in the industry — people like Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jack Nicholson. I wrote a bit more about Mr. Corman for my Subspace newsletter . That newsletter also contains info on where you can watch several of Corman’s classic movies online for free.

When a song is built around samples, have you ever been curious what songs those samples came from? WhoSampled.com might be able to help you. That link goes to the WhoSampled.com Beastie Boys search, and the Beasties sampled a lot of cool stuff. If you’re interested in digging more into the Beastie Boys’ stuff, check out BeastieBoysAnnotated.com and “Every Sample from Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul’s Boutique’” on YouTube . IndieWire put together a nice list of the cameras and lenses used to shoot 59 of the movies that played at this year’s Cannes film fest.

I like the new Civil War movie (the one about an actual modern-day civil war, not the Captain America movie from a few years back). Turns out it is more about battlefield journalism than modern U.S. politics (though it doesn’t shy away from politics). IndieWire did a piece about the movie’s impressive sound design , and Variety did a (spoilery) piece about the making of the movie’s finale . And if you want a detailed review of Civil War , Film Freak Central has a good one . I really like The Fall Guy . Because I really like movie stunts, and The Fall Guy is packed with incredible movie stunts. And also a lot of inside-baseball filmmaking stuff, which I also like, of course. Here’s a nice NPR story about the movie .